Big tech's vision of a smart world meets our demands but not our needs

All but missing from Europe's biggest tech event was the most important question: what are the social ends of technology?

In a famous 1987 essay, the American cultural historian Leo Marx asked a simple but profound question. Does improved technology mean progress? Describing how industrial capitalism has steadily unshackled the notion of progress from any larger political, moral and aesthetic sensibility, Marx challenged us to see technology as a means, not an end.

"Progress towards what?" was his rhetorical turn. "What do we want beyond such immediate, limited goals as achieving efficiencies, decreasing financial costs, and eliminating the troubling human element from our workplaces? In the absence of answers to these questions, technological improvements may very well turn out to be incompatible with genuine, that is to say social, progress."